Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

IJCS/RIÉCUnlike Christa Wolf, for whom memory is “a repeated moral act” (MC 143),Alice Munro does not see memory as a moral imperative. Instead, andincreasingly so as her work progresses, she sees it as a creative force,composed both of reproductive memory as a rich mine of material and creativememory with its shaping power. In her essay “The Colonel’s Hash Resettled”Munro explains how she employs memory, with reference to her short story“Images” (Dance of the Happy Shades):It has actually become difficult to sort out the real memories [...] usedin this story from those that are not ‘real’ at all. I think the others arereal because I did not consciously plan, make, or arrange them; Ifound them. And it is all deeply, perfectly true to me, as a dreammight be true, and all I can say, finally, about the making of a storylike this is that it must be made in the same way our dreams are made,truth in them being cast [...]. 26After giving a concrete example of her creative process, Munro continues:“Now I distrust the way I used the word remember [...]. I could have saidinvent; the kind of remembering I mean is what fictional invention is.” 27Munro has used memory material from the outset, especially in her first personnarration. In the short story, “The Peace of Utrecht,” the act of remembering isfor the first time rendered by means of metafiction, with the first personnarrator reflecting on the process of reproducing details of her recollected past.From Lives of Girls and Women onward, Munro has perfected heridiosyncratic technique of rendering memory material. Yet, being an intuitiverather than an analytical artist, Munro seems to feel uneasy about aninterpretation that sees created memory as a conscious technique in her workSo, when persistently questioned by Kay Bonetti on this point, Munro remainsnon committal until she finally concedes in her typically modest, hesitant way:“[...] though in the last book I did see that this memory thing was certainlycoming out very strong — and I hadn’t thought about making it do that.” 28Del Jordan, like her German counterpart, is endowed with an extraordinarymemory. Yet, unlike Nelly, she feels no qualms about demonstrating it,embarking on her story with great gusto, reproducing the most detaileddescriptions of people and places, as well as lengthy dialogues, from days longpast. Yet she, too, resorts to documentary evidence, trying to trace the privatefamily history in her community’s “public history,” in Uncle Craig’s oral andwritten reports. Apart from substantiating memory by documentary evidence,Munro makes her narrator reflect on the genesis of her recollections. In thethird section of the novel (“Princess Ida,” a chapter dedicated to Del’s mother),the narrator juxtaposes Ada Jordan’s and Uncle Bill’s (Ada’s brother’s)widely diverging childhood memories. Brother and sister have radicallydifferent recollections of their mother, a discrepancy that leaves the child Delbewildered and deeply doubtful about the reliability of adult people’s stories.Del begins to distrust her mother’s eloquence, her references to poetry, her78